Ein preußischer Postbeamter oder ein postmoderner Provokateur?

This article concerns itself with Gérard Genette’s reception in Germanophone literary study. Through an analysis of the rhetorical substrate from which Genette’s terminology draws its specific tension, the article determines that Genette is not only an excessive systematist, but also and simultaneously an author who battles received attempts at order and who foregrounds doubts about the idea of order. In this way, he displays a kinship with such theorists as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. The receptions of the rhetorical construction of Genette’s texts and of the particular strategies of structuralism to which that construction refers did not occur synchronously in French, American, Russian, and German literary studies. The article demonstrates that, while German literary theory occasionally discusses Genette’s positioning within the field, there remains a general absence of the recognition that practically all of his books display a definite proximity to deconstruction, and that this proximity plays a central role in Genette’s enire theoretical edifice. This text is, last but not least, a call to read literary-theoretical texts in their aesthetic contexts.

Der prix de morale der Akademie von Dijon für das Jahr 1750

The article reconsiders Rousseau’s famous Discours sur les sciences et les arts within the medial and institutional context of the prize question (prix de morale) proposed by the Academy of Dijon for the year 1750. To do so, it pays special attention to the contributions submitted by Rousseau’s (thirteen) competitors, which so far have hardly been analysed by historians of literature and philosophy. The paper also expands on the institutional and social structure of the Academy of Dijon as well as the particular profile of its morality prizes organized since 1743. In addition, the article situates the contest of 1750 in the broader context of the concours académique and outlines the evolution of the genre with its specific rhetorical traditions since the end of the seventeenth century. Thus, the crucial question, how the Academy of Dijon came to select Rousseau’s text, can be approached from a different angle. Finally, this perspective also sheds new light upon certain aspects of a major work in the history of philosophy - the Discours sur les sciences et les arts.